LITMIR.BIZ

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of the roof and enter the deserted bakery with me. We established a museum in our old disused stable, filling it with stones, fossils and sheeps’ skulls found in nearby fields.

      It was during this period that Mussolini was arrested and killed. We were treated to newsreel footage of him hanging upside down, like a pig’s carcass. How dare I make anything of my sufferings when the great world was undergoing a kind of death agony, and millions were dispossessed or dying? Who am I to cry out? No great religion has ever proposed that life is a bed of roses.

      Those summer holidays were a sickness. The days wasted away, one by one. Exam results were due to arrive by post on 5 September. The day of my complete humiliation drew nigh. On 3 September, the anniversary of the outbreak of war, I woke early, cowering in bed, listening for the sound of the postman. I was determined I could not face the parents at the breakfast table. In the end, I felt driven to go downstairs.

      The post had brought no communication.

      Next morning, anxiety roused me. I sat hunched up in bed, listening for the postman, to crawl downstairs when I knew breakfast had come and gone and Bill was in the shop.

      On the following morning, worn out by worry, I overslept.

      I was awakened by both parents rushing into my bedroom, waving pieces of paper. A modestly brilliant result! I had passed the School Cert. exam with five credits out of seven, and thus had matriculated. So delighted – and shamed? – was Bill that he thrust a cheque for ten pounds into my hand. So astonished was I that I took it.

      All my past is accepted. Yet still there remains regret that I did not reject that conscience money. I had never possessed ten pounds before; but it was my submissiveness that led me to accept the cheque so meekly, and smile while doing so, without a word of reproach.

      The incident smoulders still. It seems to epitomise much that was wrong with my parents’ relationship with their lad – and the lad with them.

      At the beginning of the next school holiday, I returned to the shop to find another change. The shop was still there, but Bill had bought a bungalow, Meadow Way, half a mile away, on the main road to Fremington. The accommodation was better and Bill could walk up to the shop every morning.

      Such memories as I have of that bungalow are entirely neutral. It was bought, taken over, and we lived there. The pieces of furniture we possessed were arranged in rooms. There was no sense that anything might be improved; we had to take the place as we found it. Nowadays, having bought a house, one expects to make all manner of alterations; conservatories are added, rewiring is done, or perhaps an attic room is created. The place is redecorated. Such ideas never entered our heads as far as wartime houses were concerned.

      In the same way, clothing had no style. I wore Bill’s cast-off sports jackets, and grey flannel trousers. I suppose everything we owned looked shabby, but we were unaware of it. In the evenings, after work, Dot and Bill padded about the place, smoking, in pre-war slippers.

      On Christmas Day, there was Bill, at the ironing board, ironing out the wrapping paper from our presents, to preserve it in a cupboard safely for the following December. Parsimony was a kind of patriotism.

      There was no going off on holiday in wartime. Betty and I walked all over the place and sketched and painted together. Betty attended an art school in Bideford and was already inclining towards costume. Unknown to us then, a pathway to the BBC was opening up ahead of her.

      Dot was altogether a more cheerful person. She laughed a lot. Over the breakfast table, she would regale us with her ludicrous dreams, which generally centred around sexual embarrassments. She would lose her corsets during an important meeting at the post office; or she would be caught by a farmer relieving herself in one of his haystacks.

      Much listening to the radio went on. Everyone’s memoirs of the war years include a compulsory reference to Tommy Handley’s I.T.M.A. We too listened devotedly, and spouted all the catch phrases. One benefit the war brought was an importation of American radio shows. So we learnt of Duffy’s Tavern, Where the Elite Meet to Eat, and became addicted to the Bob Hope Show with its signature tune ‘Thanks for the Memory’. Bob Hope was a master of one-liners. His description of a totalitarian state is classic: ‘It’s where they name a street after you one day and chase you down it the next.’

      Another favourite show was Jack Benny’s, with his black servant, Rochester. We heard later, in the time of Martin Luther King and the raising of black consciousness, that Rochester came to be regarded as an Uncle Tom. However that might be, he was the character we liked best on the show.

      Woods and fields surrounded Meadow Way, in which Betty and I strayed. We could also, with difficulty, get down to the rolling river Taw. I wrote and illustrated a book about our adventures, real and imaginary. One golden summer, possibly 1942, we picked blackberries from July until October.

      Bill still liked to shoot. Rats in the store certainly. Also rabbits for the pot. Rabbit stew with dumplings remained to our Norfolk-bred tastes. On one occasion, Bill invited me to go with him, to a glade not far from the bungalow. I took my .22. As ever, I was nervous in his presence. He seemed so to despise everything I did.

      We moved quietly down a tree-shaded lane. I was anxious to prove myself in his eyes. Rabbits sported some distance ahead. He signalled to me not to fire yet. I was a pace or two ahead of him. He wanted to give me a chance.

      Happening to glance back, I saw that two or three rabbits had hopped out of the bushes only a few yards behind us. Without thinking, I raised my .22 and fired.

      The bullet missed Bill’s ear by little more than an inch.

      ‘You silly sod,’ he said. I had never heard him swear before. ‘You silly sod. You could have killed me.’

      We returned home. I was still trembling and pale. I went to my bedroom and could not emerge again that day. Added to my own crass act was the shock of hearing Father swear. In those more polite days, the harshest words were ‘blinking’, ‘blithering’ and ‘confounded’ … possibly ‘ruddy’.

      Back at school, after the dull Bickington holidays, the times were still improving. When we entered the senior forms, we were allowed to join the Home Guard. It accustomed us to wearing khaki uniform, to working with men, and to travelling further afield. Sometimes we carried out exercises on those parts of Saunton Sands that were not mined, firing at each other with blanks.

      The only real shooting carried out on that beautiful coastline was for British films. Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra was filmed there, as was a scene from the Powell & Pressburger film A Matter of Life and Death.

      The general Sunday procedure was for a lorry to call at the school early in the morning. About ten of us, kitted out, uniformed, with army boots and rifles, would jump in. The lorry would then drive around to nearby farms, picking up the troops. Very few of them had uniforms. Very few of them seemed to know what was what. We christened one farmer’s son the Trout. He did indeed look like a fish. One Sunday, the Trout climbed into the lorry with a poker sticking out from the muzzle of his Lee Enfield. He had used the implement from his hearth to try and clean the barrel of his rifle. There it had stuck.

      Life in the Sixth Form is remembered with affection. After nine years – more for some poor wretches – at boarding schools, we had climbed to the top of the pile. There came a sort of breathing space in which to be semi-civilised, to enjoy music and the art club, even conversing with, rather than thumping, each other. We valued the artist Mr Lyons-Wilson, who drove over from Exeter once a week to talk to us of Botticelli and Gainsborough. Although Lyons-Wilson was not without his affectations, his own watercolours were masterly. Also we liked him because – as was the case with Harold Boyer – he was on our side. And amusing.

      Most of us belonged to the Phoenix Debating Society, which brought the privilege of a separate reading room. We gave readings of plays and stories for the rest of the school. I argued about religion and was permitted to make funny speeches. We formed a school jazz band in which I was the vocalist, encouraged to yell out the lyrics to ‘In the Mood’. We inclined towards the Don Smith mode of jazz: that is, very bluesy.

      You

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